6 New Articles on MakeUseOf |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [May 5th 2013]
- Share Files Easily Between Computers With AirDrop & Two Similar Applications [Mac]
- Google Adds Remote Desktop Feature To Google+ Hangouts [Updates]
- The Amalgamation of Rock, Punk, Metal & Hardcore [Sound Sunday]
- Getting Rich Snippet Video Previews Into Your Search Results
- How Many Devices That Can Connect To The Internet Do You Own? [MakeUseOf Poll]
| Cool Websites and Tools [May 5th 2013] Posted: 05 May 2013 09:31 PM PDT
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. The post Cool Websites and Tools [May 5th 2013] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Share Files Easily Between Computers With AirDrop & Two Similar Applications [Mac] Posted: 05 May 2013 06:01 PM PDT
Don’t get me wrong. Not all file-sharing is cumbersome. Online file sharing sites help you move large data quickly and efficiently between computers half a world apart, as evident by Yaara’s compilation of the 6 quickest ways to share any file with anyone. In another article, Jackson showed how to set up a network share on your Mac to move data locally. However, none of these really fit the bill if you want to move small files locally and sporadically. How often have you sent an email to yourself, simply to move a picture or document between computers? Often, the only obvious alternative is clear overkill, like setting up a temporary FTP server on your jailbroken iPad. For these kind of scenarios – moving small files quickly and efficiently – Mac OS X’s own AirDrop is the ideal tool for the job. Although AirDrop is a Mac OS X exclusive, meaning Windows computers and mobile devices are left out, applications similar to AirDrop allow you to share between those devices as well. What Is AirDrop & How Do You Use It?AirDrop was introduced with Mac OS X 10.7, Lion. Joining the other favorites in the Finder sidebar, this little chute allows you to easily share files locally between Mac’s, without prior set-up required. Simply click on the sidebar’s AirDrop icon to get started. Your Finder window transforms to a radar view, with your own user icon front and center.
Any user going into AirDrop joins this view, and is able to see the other AirDrop users. Sharing a file is now as easy as dragging it onto another user’s icon. As soon as the user accepts, the file starts transferring. This works for files of all sizes. Large movie files can be shared this way, but AirDrop can also be used to share small files almost instantly. You know, those files you’d usually email to yourself. AirDrop Alternatives – Adding CompatibilityAlthough AirDrop works like a charm, there’s one problem that’s hard to miss. Being designed specifically for Mac OS X, it offers no help in transferring files between your other devices. Moving documents from Windows to Mac computers, for example, or sharing pictures between your phone and your computer. It’s a good thing AirDrop appears to have inspired other developers. Third-party applications are implementing the same intuitive mechanism, adding compatibility with other devices. We’ll view two of these third-party AirDrop alternatives below. In time, both plan to offer compatibility with most other systems. Until then, one offers an additional Windows client, the other adding an iOS app to the mix. Filedrop (Mac + Windows)Filedrop works much like Airdrop, with the addition of a Windows client. The main difference is that, rather than residing in your Finder sidebar, Filedrop is a standalone application. Launching Filedrop shows a pop-up on your screen. Similar to Airdrop, if someone else opens Filedrop as well, they’ll become visible in the pop-up. From there on, you can share files between computers – also between a Mac and a Windows computer – by dragging and dropping them on the other user’s warning. A note of warning. Rather than displaying your user icon, Filedrop users are marked by their wallpaper, as evident in the screenshot below. This is no problem for people like me, who think grass is pretty. However, if you’re more partial to ‘spicy’ or mature wallpapers, you should think twice before firing up Filedrop.
The makers of Filedrop have big plans ahead. An iOS and Android client are scheduled to join their Mac OS X and Windows counterparts ‘soon’. You can sign up to be notified on Filedrop’s website. Apart from sharing files to and from your mobile devices, these clients will add other, less Airdrop-y features. Once available, the mobile apps will let you stream a photo slideshow or music to your computer, or even use your cellphone as a wireless USB stick. Instashare (Mac + iOS)Another free alternative to Airdrop comes courtesy of Twomanshow. Instashare currently offers a Mac OS X and iOS client. The iOS app can be used on your iPhone and on your iPad. Although the iOS app is free, there are some ads, which can be removed by a one-time payment of $0.99.
Like the other applications covered in the article so far, different clients using Instashare are visible to one another. This way, you can share files to and from your iOS device, or between two Macs, through the magic of drag-and-drop. You can access your device’s photo roll through Instashare and select multiple pictures before sharing, making it incredibly easy and fast to wirelessly share pictures to a foreign computer. Alas, because of the way iOS is designed, you can only share other files if you explicitly open them in Instashare. Most filetypes are supported, but this still means you’ll have to find an ‘open in…’ button elsewhere on your device. Luckily, iOS file manager iFile does wonders for jailbroken devices.
On the computer’s end, Instashare makes itself at home in your Mac menu bar. A useful Instashare feature lets you mark a device as trusted by selecting Always Allow on an incoming transfer prompt. This lets you download files to your computer wirelessly without having to accept them manually. However, doing this carelessly is not good for security. How do you usually move files between devices? Share your experiences in the comments below the article! The post Share Files Easily Between Computers With AirDrop & Two Similar Applications [Mac] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Google Adds Remote Desktop Feature To Google+ Hangouts [Updates] Posted: 05 May 2013 02:30 PM PDT
Potential uses are many — remote tech support comes to mind first. Hangouts Remote Desktop could be a good alternative to other remote access tools like TeamViewer, LogMeIn, GoToMyPC, and WebEX PCNow. The Google+ app has the advantage of being free, and between friends and family, you don’t have to worry too much about security, either. As both parties are in the Hangout, you can chat and see each other during the session. You can also use remote desktop whenever you need to show or view your partner’s desktop, for any reason.
Google says that the feature is powered by the same technology behind Chrome Remote Desktop. You might have to bring everyone up to speed with Google+ and how to start a Hangout in order to use it, but it could help to simplify the SOS tech calls and save you the cost of a trip or a hair-tearing phone session. It also makes Google+ Hangouts an even more worthy alternative to Skype. Will this new feature switch you over to Hangouts? The post Google Adds Remote Desktop Feature To Google+ Hangouts [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Amalgamation of Rock, Punk, Metal & Hardcore [Sound Sunday] Posted: 05 May 2013 01:30 PM PDT
Note that name your price albums can be downloaded for free by entering 0 in the price field. That said, we strongly recommend you to donate a few dollars for music you enjoy! You are welcome to submit your music, send suggestions with free albums you have discovered, or request genres I haven't covered in a while. For all Sound Sunday related inquiries, please contact Tina @ this domain. EP: Perspectives – DEMO 2011Genre: punk, hardcore, melodic hardcore From their Facebook page: Perspectives is a group of friends playing meaningful music with as much as energy as we can muster. We want to make friends and connect with as many people possible. DEMO 2011 is a name your price download from Bandcamp. Lost In Kiev – MotionsGenre: rock, post rock, post metal, post hardcore From their Last.FM profile: Inspired by their travels in the songwriting process, the musicians of Lost in Kiev want to remain as free as possible. Since it is impossible for them to stick only to the label "post-rock" to which they are clearly attached (stretched length of the titles, melancholic tracks), they juggle with various styles, from a foggy groovy trip-hop to a heavy post-hardcore via an epic metal. Motions is a name your price download from Bandcamp. The Boring – Let The Captain SinkGenre: hardcore, punk, melodic hardcore From their website: Here are The Boring, a 5 pieces punk-hardcore band from Colmar, eastern France. (…) We play fast, we scream loud and make crappy jokes! And we’re not satisfied of it. We want more ! We’ll do more ! We’re working more ! music merch Noisefight – Downward SpiralGenre: punk, hardcore, melodic hardcore From their Facebook page: The band was formed in February 2010. by young musicians with a desire to develop their ideas and enthusiasm to contribute Croatia and Pula punk-rock scene by their own original arrangements. Noisefight presented themselves to the audience at early beginning, performing on the Festival of "Media Mediteranea” with several other bands. Inspired by music of bands like Bad Religion, Rise Against, Ignite, and similar, are trying to make interesting and creative music and present it to the audience carried by energy and good cheer that are manifested in the texts of original songs. Downward Spiral is a name your price download from Bandcamp. EP: The Recovery! – This One’s For The Lovers…Genre: punk, pop, rock, metal, hardcore The Recovery! are a heavy rock & Roll band from Glasgow in the UK. The five lads have received rage reviews from several music magazines and radio shows. Tom Aylott (Rock Sound Magazine): Forged from heavy roots, the band manage to intertwine melodic and punk sensibilities under some enviably heavy segments in their stride (…). This One’s For The Lovers… is a free download from Bandcamp. polaroids – i still have dreams,Genre: indie, punk, pop, emo, hardcore, melodic hardcore New Jersey’s Polaroids play melodic hardcore loaded with energy. The driven sound is contrasted with quieter passages, filled with guitar solos and percussion instruments. i still have dreams, is a name your price download from Bandcamp. EP: Gatherer – PostcardsGenre: punk, hardcore post hardcore, post punk Gatherer is a five piece hardcore band from New Jersey. They are presently crowd-funding their debut album Caught Between a Rock and a Sad Place via an indiegogo campaign. Two weeks left to help an independent band self-release their music. Postcards is a name your price download from Bandcamp. Lay It On The Line – CrowhurstGenre: punk, rock, hardcore, post-hardcore, melodic hardcore From their homepage: We are 4 gentlemen who enjoy making music and have done since we did our first show in 2012. We, so far, a demo, an EP and a mini album and a split EP with Arizona from Belgium as of May 2013. We thank anyone massively for taking an interest in our band. Crowhurst is a name your price download from Bandcamp. EP: Loyalist – Train Tracks EPGenre: rock, metal, metalcore, hardcore, melodic hardcore, screamo From their Facebook page: Loyalist is a six piece melodic metalcore group from Toronto, Canada. The band started based on the concept of two guitarists, Adrian Hawryschuk and Connor Robinson. The pair began writing material and recording pre-production which served as the basis for the now ‘Train Tracks EP’. (…) With goals in sight, you can expect big things in the future from Loyalist. Train Tracks EP is a name your price download from Bandcamp. The Silent Divine – All In On NothingGenre: rock, metal, metalcore From their Facebook page: Arising from the Denver music scene in 2010, The Silent Divine presented to the public their ground-breaking demo; including songs such as Wicked Lies (…) and Fade Away. (…) The Silent Divine has expanded on their sound in every direction, adding life into a genre that has become watered down by carbon copies. The Silent Divine has proved that they are a force to be reckoned with, as their music appeals to metal fans and non-metal fans alike. All In On Nothing is a free download from Bandcamp. And More…Enjoyed one of these albums? Pay it back and share this article or the albums you liked. If you really appreciated a particular album, please donate to the respective artist, so they can continue releasing great music. New to Sound Sunday? Past editions of Sound Sunday are available here. Are you using ifttt? Check out these recipes for receiving notifications of new Sound Sunday releases to GTalk and Pushover for mobile devices. Thank you @Vampie! Feel free to get in touch with me [tina at makeuseof dot com] to share free material, suggestions, and feedback or simply add your comments below. The post The Amalgamation of Rock, Punk, Metal & Hardcore [Sound Sunday] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Getting Rich Snippet Video Previews Into Your Search Results Posted: 05 May 2013 11:31 AM PDT
We’ve talked about Rich Snippets before – pieces of meta you can add to a page that Google will understand and potentially include in the search results. Authorship is one example; here’s one of my own search results, standing out nicely on a video game review search.
In short, users are more likely to click on something when it’s not just a bland text result. What you really want then, is for Google to recognize that your page contains a nice juicy video that you put time into creating, and to rank that page higher or with potentially more visibility. Here’s another result from the same search result, though it’s actually ranking further down the page since it’s less relevant. Still, it highlights nicely rich, video content.
How To Get Video Previews into GoogleThis is not an easy task, and as ever – there’s no guarantee that your site will benefit from them. However, here are the basic steps needed: 1. Host your own videos. Don’t use YouTube. What’s Wrong With YouTube?There’s nothing wrong with YouTube per se, but you’ll be in competition with yourself. YouTube is indeed a great inbound marketing tool. Users may stumble across your video, love the content and try to find more at a site address listed, particularly if it’s a viral teaser or “full instructions at the link in the description” type video. But they may also just click through to another related video and never visit your site at all. The point is that when you make YouTube videos to accompany the page you’re trying to rank with, you’ll more than likely be outranked by your own video as a YouTube result; it won’t be a pretty thumbnail pointing to your page, it’ll be pointing to YouTube. There’s a time and place and a reason to use YouTube videos. Outranking your own content is not one of them. Hosting & PlayerThe simplest option here is to upload video content to your own site, so we’ll use that for demonstration purposes. There are ways of using a premium Vimeo account, or some other third party hosts, but since you already have webspace you might as well use it. If you’re expecting a lot of traffic, be sure to have this all cached with a CDN (see my tips on how to speed up a WordPress blog). Next, we need a suitable player – something that outputs HTML5, but can fallback to Flash or Silverlight when absolutely needed. For this, let’s use MediaElements.js; it’s a capable player for all kinds of media. You can find it directly from the WordPress dashboard.
Usually we would embed the video using a shortcode like this: [video src="myvideo.mp4"] However, this won’t result in Schema.org markup being used, so instead we’re going to manually code it like this: <video width="600" height="400" controls="controls" preload="true" itemprop="video" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject"> <source src="http://technophiliapodcast.com/podcast/tech63.mp4" type="video/mp4" /> <meta itemprop="name" content="Technophilia Technology Podcast, Episode 63 - Generic Podcast Listener"/> <meta itemprop="contentURL" content="http://technophiliapodcast.com/podcast/tech63.mp4" /> <meta itemprop="description" content="Episode 63 of Technophilia Technology Podcast" /> <meta itemprop="thumbnailUrl" content="http://technophiliapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/tech63.png" /> </video> Which still results in this:
Warning: Don’t switch back to visual editor or your code will be butchered apart. Yes, not ideal. The best would be to adjust or code your own plugin that would load the MediaElements.js player AND output suitable markup. Nevertheless, this is what we have. Check your markup using the Rich Snippet Tester, but be aware that it won’t show a video preview in the tool – just check if the markup is correct:
Video SitemapsUnfortunately, this is where things get really difficult. If you search the WordPress plugins directory for “Video sitemaps”, you’ll find a few plugins claiming to do this. However, they only work with YouTube links, which for our purposes is completely worthless. There isn’t a free WordPress plugin that will work for our needs, but you can manually code a video sitemap like this (I’m being lazy and not writing a proper description, but you should): <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"> <url> <loc>http://technophiliapodcast.com/2013/63-generic-podcast-listener/</loc> <video:video> <video:thumbnail_loc>http://technophiliapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/tech63.png</video:thumbnail_loc> <video:title>Episode 63 of Technophilia Technology Podcast</video:title> <video:description>Episode 63 of Technophilia Technology Podcast</video:description> <video:content_loc>http://technophiliapodcast.com/podcast/tech63.mp4</video:content_loc> <video:duration>5204</video:duration> </video:video> </url> </urlset> (included above are the basic minimum of required fields, except for duration – in seconds – which optional but recommended) Alternatively, Yoast – the creator of the famous WordPress SEO plugin (featured on our Best WordPress Plugins) – offers a premium plugin to handle this side of things, and it integrates nicely with the MediaElements.js player. The downside is the price, at a whopping $60 for a single site or $250 for a developer licence. Then again, if you’re putting at least an hour into making each video, they really deserve a little love and attention on the SEO side. Submission To GoogleFinally, log into Google Webmaster Tools and point it toward your video sitemap. Mission accomplished.
It’s a shame there’s not an easier way to do this, but that’s what you get for being on the bleeding edge of Internet developments. Video previews in the search results will give you a competitive edge, but remember – if your accompanying content or the video itself isn’t up to scratch, that effort will have been wasted. Do you know of a better way to handle this in WordPress? Let us know. The post Getting Rich Snippet Video Previews Into Your Search Results appeared first on MakeUseOf. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| How Many Devices That Can Connect To The Internet Do You Own? [MakeUseOf Poll] Posted: 05 May 2013 10:30 AM PDT
Out of 135 votes in total, 9% think sponsored posts are fine, 14% simply ignore them, 21% hate sponsored posts, and a full 56% of the voters don’t like them, but understand why they’re necessary. It did come to my attention that some people didn’t vote because they couldn’t find an answer that fit them perfectly, and I’d like to remind you again that it’s impossible to include every possible answer in these polls. If you see an answer that comes pretty close, go ahead and vote for that! You can always clarify your opinion in the comments, and we’d love to hear it. Full results and this week’s poll after the jump. Don’t forget to check out last week’s best comment by Zhong J who won 150 reward points! Also, if you’re in the habit of writing interesting comments to our polls, please go ahead and log in! I see many good comments I cannot reward, which is a shame.
This week’s poll question is: How Many Devices That Can Connect To The Internet Do You Own? Want to make some extra MakeUseOf reward points? The most useful comment on the poll will be awarded 150 points! Only two weeks ago, I asked you how many apps you have installed on your phone. Today, I’d like to know how many devices you own. But I’m not necessarily referring to smartphones this time, but to any and all devices that can connect to the Internet. This includes smartphones, tablets, computers, eReaders, game consoles, and even specialty devices such as TVs, smartpens, refrigerators, and any other such thing you might own. You may look at this poll and think you don’t own many, but when I started counting myself, I was surprised at the result. It seems that almost everything we buy these days has the ability to connect to the Internet, whether we like it or not. So what’s your magic number?
Don’t forget to detail in the comments which devices you own. Do you have a lamp with an Internet connection? Tell us all about it! The post How Many Devices That Can Connect To The Internet Do You Own? [MakeUseOf Poll] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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With the myriad of ways devices are, or can be connected, it still amazes me how hard it is to share small amounts of data between two different computers. The same goes for sharing files with your phone or tablet.
Google added a small but potentially significant update to its Google+ Hangouts: a remote desktop feature. Similar to Skype’s desktop-sharing feature, Google+ remote desktop lets you remotely control and view another person’s computer while chatting away, assuming you get that person’s permission, of course. The Hangouts Remote Desktop is tucked away under the Add Apps section on a Hangout, so,next time you launch a Hangout session, go to View More Apps – Add Apps – Hangouts Remote Desktop to enable this feature.
This week 
Producing your own video content is great. Search engines and users alike love video content. It increases user engagement – keeping visitors on your page – but moreover it’s just makes your content more interesting, adding value. You’re already doing this? Awesome – but do you upload them all to YouTube and just embed them on your site? Yes? Then you’re doing it wrong.
Last week we asked you 
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